Description

This curriculum spans the equivalent of a multi-workshop technical advisory engagement, covering the same technical and governance activities performed during an enterprise cloud migration supported by internal architecture and operations teams.

Module 1: Strategic Assessment and Readiness Evaluation

Conduct a workload dependency analysis to identify inter-system communication patterns that impact migration sequencing.
Evaluate existing licensing agreements for on-premises software to determine transferability and cost implications in cloud environments.
Define migration eligibility criteria based on performance, compliance, and technical constraints for each application.
Perform a TCO comparison between maintaining legacy infrastructure and projected cloud operational costs over a five-year horizon.
Engage business unit stakeholders to prioritize applications based on business impact and downtime tolerance.
Establish a cross-functional readiness board to approve or defer migration candidates based on technical and organizational preparedness.

Module 2: Target Architecture Design and Sizing

Select between lift-and-shift, refactor, rearchitect, or replace strategies based on application technical debt and long-term ownership goals.
Define virtual machine instance types and storage classes aligned with observed peak utilization metrics from on-prem monitoring tools.
Design network topology including VPC structure, subnet segmentation, and DNS integration with existing corporate domains.
Implement secure connectivity patterns using site-to-site VPN or Direct Connect with failover and bandwidth guarantees.
Specify data residency requirements and map them to available cloud regions and availability zones.
Integrate identity sources using federation with on-prem Active Directory or managed identity services with conditional access policies.

Module 3: Data Migration Planning and Execution

Classify data by sensitivity and regulatory category to determine encryption, masking, and transfer protocols.
Choose between online and offline data transfer methods based on volume, network bandwidth, and acceptable downtime windows.
Validate referential integrity after database migration using checksums and row count reconciliation across source and target.
Implement change data capture (CDC) for large databases to minimize cutover time and maintain data consistency.
Configure storage tiering policies for migrated data based on access frequency and retention requirements.
Establish ownership and stewardship roles for data post-migration to support ongoing governance and compliance audits.

Module 4: Application Refactoring and Modernization

Decompose monolithic applications into microservices using bounded context analysis and API gateway integration.
Migrate stateful components to managed services or redesign for stateless operation using externalized session stores.
Replace hardcoded configuration with centralized parameter stores or configuration management services.
Implement health checks and liveness probes for containerized workloads to enable automated recovery.
Adopt infrastructure-as-code templates to ensure consistent deployment of refactored components across environments.
Refactor legacy authentication mechanisms to integrate with cloud-native identity and access management frameworks.

Module 5: Security, Compliance, and Identity Governance

Map existing on-prem security controls to cloud-native equivalents such as security groups, NACLs, and WAF rules.
Implement least-privilege IAM roles and policies using attribute-based access control and just-in-time elevation.
Configure centralized logging and monitoring to meet regulatory requirements for audit trail retention and access.
Enforce encryption at rest and in transit using customer-managed or cloud provider-managed keys with rotation policies.
Conduct penetration testing on migrated workloads and address findings before production cutover.
Integrate with existing SIEM systems to maintain end-to-end visibility across hybrid environments.

Module 6: Operational Transition and Runbook Development

Transfer operational ownership by developing runbooks that document cloud-specific troubleshooting procedures and escalation paths.
Migrate monitoring configurations to cloud-native tools and align alerting thresholds with historical baselines.
Train L1/L2 support teams on cloud console navigation, log querying, and incident response workflows.
Establish backup and recovery SLAs using cloud-native snapshot and replication services with regular restore validation.
Implement cost monitoring alerts and tagging policies to assign accountability for resource usage.
Define change management procedures for cloud infrastructure updates using approval workflows and deployment gates.

Module 7: Cutover Management and Post-Migration Optimization

Execute a phased cutover using blue-green deployment patterns to minimize business disruption during DNS and data synchronization.
Validate end-user access and performance post-cutover using synthetic transactions and real-user monitoring.
Decommission on-premises infrastructure only after confirming data consistency and business continuity over a defined stabilization period.
Conduct a post-migration review to identify performance bottlenecks and rightsizing opportunities for compute and storage.
Optimize cloud spend by identifying underutilized resources and implementing auto-scaling or scheduling policies.
Update disaster recovery plans to reflect new cloud-based replication, failover, and recovery time objectives.